New Edinburgh director puts L'Orfeo centre stage for festival

The new director of the Edinburgh International Festival yesterday promised a programme for this year ranging "from the deeply serious to the seriously fun", which he hoped would appeal to everyone.

The appointment last year of Jonathan Mills, an Australian university academic little known in this country to head the festival which, counting the sprawling fringe, is the largest in the world, was greeted with astonishment.

But yesterday he said: "Festivals are a gift, a special gift from a city to itself, to its citizens, to its visitors, to its future, to its very soul."

Despite an inherited £1m overdraft, the festival starts two days earlier than usual, on August 10, and run for three weeks.

The programme is built around the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. There will be world premieres in music and theatre, seven UK premieres and two European premieres, and a liberal scattering of classical mythology and legend across the programme, including premieres of Cologne Opera's production of Strauss's Capriccio, David Greig's Bacchae, and the European premiere for the American Repertory Theatre's Orpheus X.

Music from the 11th to 17th centuries can be heard at Greyfriars Kirk and visiting orchestras include the Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and the Tokyo String Quartet.

The world premieres include a work for Scottish Ballet by Stephen Petronio, and theatre includes the opera La Didone, through the prism of cult film Planet of the Vampires.